Comma

A collection of specially commissioned, urban short stories edited by Ra Page to mark the launch of Comma Press.

The city is at once strange and strangely familiar in these stories. Friendships break up or never quite begin across dark, decaying bars; lives are relived on home video, deaths pawed over in a crime photographer's fixing fluid. One woman's paranoia about being mugged or burgled leads to her questioning her own sanity; another, driving home late one night, wonders how the events in her life have led inexorably to this moment. A woman dozing in her bathtub feels the wooden keel of a boat slowly sprouting from her head; a man on his way to a job interview suddenly realises he hasn't passed water for four days.

Real or surreal, despairing or defiant, these stories prove that far from being a genre of offcuts and unfinished ideas, the short story, if only we give it a moment, is very much alive and well.